In October 2025, the Danish Cultural Institute in the Baltic States, together with the Royal Danish Embassy in Lithuania, in cooperation with local partners, presented two books: Ebbe Flatau’s autobiographical book, Litauen I / Lietuva I (translated from Danish by Loreta Vaicekauskienė) and Thomas Græsbøll Svaneborg and Brian Traantoft Rasmussen’s Flugten fra Stalin (Escape from Stalin).
The first book, published in two languages, Danish and Lithuanian, is the autobiography by the first Danish lecturer at the Department of Scandinavian Studies at Vilnius University, Ebbe Flatau (born 1938 in Kaunas). The engaging story tells the author’s family history in Lithuania before the Second World War. The agricultural reforms of that time and the political agreements between Denmark and Lithuania attracted a considerable Danish colony to Lithuania. Ebbe Flatau was one of the few Danes born on one of the Danish farms established in Lithuania.
The second book sheds a wide light on the fates of thousands of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians who bravely decided to cross the Baltic Sea at the end of the war, seeking temporary refuge in Denmark, when their homelands were occupied by the Soviets. Based on archival research, letters, diaries and interviews with refugees and their descendants, the authors recreated a dramatic and, at the same time, hopeful story of loss, hope, courage and a sense of belonging.